Cards You Might Be Sleeping On

By TQ

In a closed format, there is still room left to explore. Taking inspiration from a certain article extolling the virtues of every card choice in Moneyball Black, I’ve decided to share my own list of sleeper cards for Premodern. Cards come and go from being in vogue, but I hope to illuminate just how wide and wonderful the card pool truly is.

‍ ‍Aside from sharing my hot takes on cardboard, I’d like to take a moment to promote Rose City Premodern’s Tournament of Champions. Please join us for what will hopefully be the biggest Premodern event on the West Coast ever!

White

White Weenies has been my newest obsession. My experimentations brought me to Nova Cleric, a card I’d often considered but never tried. I wanted another tool I could run multiple of, since White Weenies has very little card selection or draw. The flexibility of a solid body and mid/late game enchantment removal drew me in.
If we look at how Nova Cleric lines up against the top metagame, we can see that it blocks many relevant creatures or trades with key enchantment cards.

• Against Goblins, it blocks Lackey and lives through Mogg Fanatic or Gempalm starts, giving you plenty of space.

• Against black decks, Nova Cleric lets you escape from the suite of hateful black sideboard enchantments, notably Engineered Plague, Dystopia, and Gloom. For a mono white deck, a 1 drop that breaks Gloom is huge!

• Against Sligh, it kills or trades with all their 1 drop creatures and forces a Shock. Nova Cleric can trade with key enchantments that apply pressure like Sulfuric Vortex or Pyrostatic Pillar.

• Against the various green decks, it can trade with enchantments like Sylvan Library or Survival of the Fittest that can dominate a game if left unanswered.

• Against Landstill, it slips under the namesake Standstill and can answer it without giving away 3 cards.

• Against Oath decks, a turn 1 Nova Cleric can answer Oath if you’re on the play, and can answer on the draw with a Mox Diamond or Sol land

• And of course, this card can blow up Opalescence + Parallax Wave combo and is hateful against the entire Enchantress shell and some amount of the Replenish shell.

Another selection from my White Weenies tinkering. Brought to my attention by the fantastic Gabe Menendez White Lightning list, this card is an absolute powerhouse in disguise. If you comb through the white card pool, you will quickly realize that 4 power of evasive attackers for 4 mana is just about the best rate in the color for applying serious pressure. The flashback cost does require a bit of a commitment to white creatures, but the price is well worth the cost.

Don’t let the 1/1 size fool you, this is a white Call of the Herd. Spreading the power across four bodies makes it hard to handle in the Swords to Plowshares and Smother format, and flying conveniently dodges Earthquake which has begun to crop up across red lists. Your bird army can still meet an untimely end to Pyroclasm, Engineered Plague, or Goblin Sharpshooter, but in the majority of your games you’ll be casting a 5 turn clock for 4 mana.

Blue

Sneaking into Premodern from Chronicles, this fun an exciting card has a myriad of uses and potential homes. Don’t let the upkeep scare you, paying UU each turn for a Terravore or an Exalted Angel is well worth the cost of admission.

The true value of this card lies in the separated enter and leave triggers. Similar to the Parallax enchantments, you can exploit the leave trigger with a bounce, Disenchant, or sacrifice effect, letting you permanently copy any creature with no upkeep cost for UU. A deck running 4 Meddling Mages, 4 Dance of Many, and 4 bounce cards could play a 12 Mages deck and entirely shut the opponent out from playing the game!

Another blue enchantment that can abuse the “leave the battlefield” trigger. While this doesn’t generate card advantage by itself, forcing the LTB to trigger before the search gives you a shuffle, followed by stacking/removing the top 10 cards of your library! It can be tough to justify blue selection that doesn’t draw, but Ancestral Knowledge + Chain of Vapor followed by recasting the Ancestral Knowledge lets you dig 20 cards deep for 5 mana and 2 cards.

‍ ‍A Tinker Fling pilot ran Ancestral Knowledge to a top 8 finish at 2025 Lobstercon. This card has already proven its usefulness in combo shells, but trying to abuse this card multiple times could give a ton of consistency to turbo combo decks, or to find silver bullets to beat hate. Replenish can flicker this after assembling the combo to stack all the remaining Replenishes on top of the deck, or Landstill can Chain this before copying to hit an opposing creature while digging 20 deep to find their Wrath of God.

Black

It isn’t often you can say that interaction is slept on. Formats stabilize around efficient answers and answers are much easier to evaluate and analyze compared to threats or synergies. Smother is widely held to be the best black removal, and we have a smattering of other choices that can hit some higher CMC targets. Paralyze is a great second tool in your arsenal. Against a deck like Terrageddon, you don’t want to blow your Smother on a Weathered Wayfarer when a Terravore is lurking around the corner, but you can happily commit your Paralyze.

Paralyze isn’t perfect by any means, being a sorcery speed answer that your opponent can curve out of. However, it is always a winning value proposition. Paralyze is a 1-for-1 answer that costs 1 mana. If your opponent pays to untap, you’ve spent 1 mana compared to taxing 4 of theirs. If your opponent removes Paralyze, it is at worst a 1 mana for 1 mana trade, often 1 of your mana for 2 of theirs. If your opponent removes it, it was a 1-for-1 card trade. Paralyze is at its best against little creatures with tap effects, as something like a Weathered Wayfarer or Grim Lavamancer becomes prohibitively expensive at 5 per activation instead of 1. Paralyze is great alongside board sweepers, as Paralyze can hold down the game until your Wrath of God, Earthquake, or Engineered Plague can clean up multiple targets. Even against larger targets like a Terravore or Exalted Angel, Paralyze can stall them and force them to commit mana so they can’t further develop. If you’re a real sicko, you can combine Paralyze with mana disruption like Wasteland or Rishadan Port, or one of the numerous black Stone Rains to keep your opponent off of 4 mana.

This card is freaking sweet. Even outside of usefulness in a game, I enjoy the flavor of this card immensely. Part of the staying power of Magic: the Gathering has to do with cards like this, dripping with flavor and with a cool unique ability.

Flavor fanboying aside, I think this is a cool top end for Bx decks. Built in evasion, resistant to Lightning Bolt, and it synergizes with the black interaction suite of discard and removal. As we live in an Enchantress world, this card should become more relevant than ever as the life loss trigger goes through Solitary Confinement lock! This card does a fantastic Shrimp or Terry impression, as it doesn’t require very many hits to drop an opponent. It does have a few caveats, notably the evasion being weak into black/artifact and being a poor blocker, but luckily there are some cards (Paralyze!!!!) that can help force this through when the fear fails.

A special shout out to our local black aficionado and tireless content creator Mr. Haldrik Gaming for putting together this beautiful Guilty Oath deck and championing Guilt Feeder over the years. Watch him play this deck here.

Red

Yes, I know this card is a deck archetype. That said, it isn’t a very popular deck archetype. Lightning Rifter is a sleeper deck and can be fearsome in the hands of a skilled pilot. Local Portland area legend Duck has shown me the true strength of this Rifter, and I think this archetype and card have a lot of potential with some new ideas.

Lightning Rift presents both suppression and a win condition, making it a flexible card depending on the game state. The target is selected as the ability stacks, but the mana payment is on resolution, which makes protecting creatures on the board a nightmare for opposing decks. Lightning Rift can go upstairs too, and it doesn’t take many Shocks before the opponent is in the danger zone. I think this card has a lot of potential in other color Rifter shells, and I’d like to explore RG or BR Rifter when I have more time. The idea of a combo shell with Fluctuator, Lightning Rift, and a Songs of the Damned giving mana to activate Lightning Rift 10 times sounds intriguing.

Many have tried; none have truly succeeded. Discard to Lightning Bolt is a simple premise, and going up to 8 Bolts sounds great! Reliably discarding it for value is a bit tricky though, and while Lightning Bolt is a great card we don’t want to run a bad enabler just to sometimes make Bolt 5-8.

‍ ‍I’m convinced this card will find a home in Premodern. I’ve tried it in RG and BR discard shells, leveraging cards like Wild Mongrel or Zombie Infestation to give some useful action while discarding. The problem I’ve run into with these strategies is that while Mongrel or ZI are amazing, the next best options are lackluster. I’ve also tried it in 5c Tireless Tribe where I had a surplus of discard outlets to reliably turn it on. Still, I think there are plenty of untapped discard outlets like the Spellshaper cards, or the Dreams cards. Throwing a handful of Bolts or Fiery Tempers just to pick them back up again with Nostalgic Dreams sounds like a ton of fun.

Green

Fog effects are underrated. With the alternate win conditions being unreliable, games of Premodern are usually won via combat damage, direct damage, or a library mill out. Fog effects tackle combat damage, far and away the most common of the three methods to win a game.

One of the downsides of a Fog is that they don’t fix the board. If you’re in a tight race, a well-timed Fog can let you reach the finish line before your opponent, but when you need to find another Swords to Plowshares a Fog doesn’t cut it. Moment’s Peace helps to relieve this problem, offering a two-in-one Fog that can create space to draw furthers answers. The two-in-one nature of Moment’s Peace makes it more resistant to Counterspells and discard, and it gives a wider margin when you’re in a damage race. While Premodern has a nice selection of Fog effects, I think Moment’s Peace stands head and shoulders above the rest.

I swear I’m not just picking fantastic Rebecca Guay artwork! Abundance is a well-known draw combo with Sylvan Library, offering 3 cards per turn without any damage penalties. Even without Sylvan, Abundance keeps your game on track and can keep mana or spells flowing.

‍ ‍Aside from Sylvan Library or Horn of Greed synergies, what interests me the most about Abundance is the ability to stack your entire deck. By drawing or removing all the lands in your deck, you can choose land to reveal your entire library and then place them on the bottom in any order. This is ripe for shenanigans, and you can assemble all manner of combo wins after using mono green Doomsday. Enterprising mages might know of Mana Severance to remove your lands and stack your deck, but I’d like to bring up Scouting Trek as another tool to abuse Abundance without having to exile every land in your deck.

Artifacts

While this card is infamous as an all-in turbo combo card, there hasn’t been much experimentation with other Fluctuator ideas. Moving cards from an unknown zone to a known zone is ripe for exploitation, and Fluctuator can move a lot of cards to a known zone. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but some immediate thoughts that come to mind include:

• Living Death or Replenish to pull everything back to the battlefield

• Songs of the Damned to add a ton of mana

• Nature’s Resurgence to draw a fresh grip of cards

• Soulshriek to turn any 1/1 into a lethal attack

• Lhurgoyfs, even the non-Terravore ones

• Run a 40-card deck with 20 cards you’d like to cycle through, similar to “Zero Effect” decks

With mill as one of the main 3 ways to win a game of Premodern, you’d expect to see Altar of Dementia significantly more. Tinker Fling puts it to good use, both as a payoff for Phyrexian Devourer and as another combo half for Devourer that can be searched up off Tinker.

I think Altar of Dementia is the card to make Ichorid shine. With an Altar in play, you can keep sacrificing Ichorid to mill yourself 3 and find more fuel for Ichorid. It allows you to dodge Swords, protecting your bug-zombie-nightmare monstrosity from early retirement. Altar of Dementia also brings a mill 12 with Phyrexian Dreadnought and a snowballing game ending combo with Tombstone Stairwell. If your deck plays from the graveyard, Altar can turn any creature into virtual card advantage.